The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is an open source international collaboration that provides a robust, distributed data and computation platform in support of the international climate modelling community. The federation enables access to Peta-scale scientific data for the purpose of supporting large collaborative projects such as CMIP6 - the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. ESGF is used by scientists around the world to access data, such as CMIP, to study the changing climate. Data from ESGF are ultimately used by government bodies for policy making decisions both at the national and international level such as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

A stand at NERC’s public engagement event, called UnEarthed, was recently run by CEDA (Centre for Environmental Data Analysis*) staff. UnEarthed was a showcase of the diverse environmental science undertaken by NERC scientists, ranging from decaying Puffins, making clouds in a bottle, to virtual reality floods. The event was free to attend at Dynamic Earth, in Edinburgh, and nearly ~7000 people visited over 4 days.